After the Norman Conquest, nearby Duffield Frith was the property of the de Ferrers family who were iron masters in Normandy.

Fortuitously, Butterley Hall fell vacant and in 1790 Outram, with the financial assistance of Francis Beresford, bought it and its estate.

In 1793 the French Revolutionary Wars broke out and by 1796 the blast furnace was producing nearly a thousand tons of pig iron a year.

The company also owned Hilt's Quarry at Crich, which supplied limestone for the ironworks and for the limekilns at Bullbridge, providing lime for farmers and for the increasing amount of building work.

The steep wagonway to the Cromford Canal at Bullbridge was called the Butterley Gangroad and incorporated the world's oldest surviving railway tunnel, at Fritchley (built 1793).

[1] In 1812, William Brunton, an engineer for the company, produced his remarkable Steam Horse locomotive In 1817, in the depression following the Napoleonic Wars, the works at Butterley was the scene of the Pentrich Revolution.

By this time the company owned a considerable number of quarries for limestone and mines for coal and iron, and installed a third blast furnace at Codnor Park.

Francis worked for his first years at Butterley with William Jessop the younger (the founding partner's son), and then remained very involved with the company until his death in 1873, building the town of Ironville to house Butterley workers, and often travelling for miles every day by horse and carriage from his estate at Osmaston near Ashbourne to Ripley.

Thomas Telford's Caledonian Canal used lock gates and machinery with castings produced at Butterley, and two steam dredgers designed by Jessop.

Alleyne's next invention was the two high reversing steel mill patented in 1870, which used two steam engines to allow metal ingots to be repeatedly rolled to get the correct size and section.

In 1885 the Butterley Company made the Grade II listed footbridge for Cromford Station,[10] which was used by Oasis for a photograph shoot for the record sleeve for their 1995 single called 'Some might say.

[13] Discussing the war work which the Butterley Company undertook during WW2, Roy Christian stated that "The workers who made mysterious floats had no idea of their ultimate purpose until one morning in June 1944 they realised that their products were helping to support the Mulberry Harbour off the low coastline of Normandy, and by that time they were busy building pontoon units and Bailey bridge panels ready for the breakthrough into Germany.

Butterley Hall, which had been home to Outram and then to Albert Leslie Wright before his death in 1938, after which it became offices, was sold off to become the headquarters of Derbyshire Constabulary.

[18] Butterley Engineering Co. manufactured the Glengall Bridge across the Millwall Dock in London, which was designed to open to allow shipping traffic to pass through.

Following the closure of Butterley Limited in 2009, Wellman Booth acquired certain assets, spares and intellectual property rights of the company.

Wellman Booth is a division of The Clarke Chapman Group Ltd, itself a wholly owned subsidiary of Langley Holdings plc.